As we move ever closer to winter break I really need o get on the stick in terms of working toward and completing a draft of my introductory chapter (or at least the chapter contextualizing my work within Rhet/Comp. To that end, I'll add notes here on articles as I get through them, but I am also using these notes to generate ideas, so they often stray from the text I'm discussing. I'm going to try to post one or two of these a day for the next 10 days (what's left of Thanksgiving Break and the semester).

"Scholars are attempting not only to explore the conceptual frameworks of the field and its relation to other disciplines but also to examine the nature of their own inquiry as symbolic action. As I will try to show, this reflexivity is uniquely central to composition studies, deriving from the complex theory-praxis relation that characterizes the field" (182).

How does the interrogation of rhetoric and composition's attitude toward service relate to arguments of praxis?


"So one must characterize a disciplinary domain via the relationships among the following elements: a group of inquirers, a characteristic attitude toward phenomena, the objects of inquiry themselves, the means of inquiry, its purposes, and scenic factors" (182).

Phelps lays out the agents or actors involved in defining a discipline. While she draws on Burke to do so, she could easily be referring to Latour or Star here (though this work predates at least some of that--1986).

Disciplinarity reflects the complex relationships among people and objects. It is constrained by the context for their interactions as well as their attitudes toward one another. How would she define attitudes here? Obviously, they are phenomenological (contained by their materiality and understanding of those conditions), but I'm not sure what she's adding here other than saying that disciplinarity cannot be attributed to a single factor or a human agent.


"...domain suggests the metaphor of a space one controls" (emphasis in original 182).

While I take issue with this idea of control, I'm glad Phelps points toward the rhetoricity of domain and referring to composition as a domain. How does domain relate to Star's notion of boundary objects? It certainly implies specific boundaries, and Phelps will continue by discussing how a discipline needs specific boundaries to carry out disciplinary and interdisciplinary work.


"...defining the domain of composition amounts to negotiating a territorial claim with other disciplines over the responsibility that each has for a particular dimension of human life or mode of understanding it" (182).

In some ways, what I'm trying to get at is that we spend little time considering what a domain is in terms of infrastructure/its materiality. If we consider that as a domain a discipline encompasses the physical, liminal, and social space of praxis rather than a metaphoric thunderdome where theory and practice fight it out, then we begin to see disciplinarity's infrastructural underpinnings. These relate to but are not limited to institutional, departmental, and programmatic functioning (the local). They also eclipse the local and work across institutions: in fact they must move beyond local boundaries. Seeing Rhet/Comp as a domain includes but moves past interrogating its daily functioning (practice) as well as its intellectual aspirations (theory). Often, it seems, we focus on the latter and disregard the former, especially when we can label this functioning as service. When we do consider daily practices it's often reduced to lore or business decisions rather than being seen as small changes to that infrastructure. To date many of the folks trying to deal with this division have focused on the importance of theory, but they've also ignored theory in infrastructural terms. They see theory as the set of abstractions that guide pragmatic decisions, as a sort of pure ideology. Historically, this is equally true for folks who identify with the composition side of Rhet/Comp than those folks who identify with the rhetoric side of the equation (as exemplified by Sharon Crowley and her focus on dispatching the universal requirement to the dustbin of disciplinarity).

There are some problems with the above passage as it doesn't consider all the nuances in these arguments, but one thing I'll need to look more closely at is this obsession with the split between theory and practice and the ways previous scholars try to overcome it--at least enough to position why looking at infrastructure is different. Who already sort of does this? What terms do they use?

There's also an implicit critique of the overemphasis on the local.

Phelps leaves space for addressing this disparity in terms of understanding how the local relates to the global in defining a disciplinary domain. She talks about how interdisciplinarity relates to being able to define your discipline and how it views something differently than other disciplines. These divisions make collaboration possible. What does Rhet/Comp offer that another discipline would not? is it simply a knowledge of writing and the practical ability to carry out writing tasks, or is it something more. It seems to me that one of the things we need to take advantage of is the universal requirement. Rhet/Comp has tremendous social power. A failure to understand this infrastructurally also represents a failure to see beyond the practical or the abstract.


"My object is to push outward from the expanding conceptual core of the domain, defined in terms of symbolic action, to its margins, where composition encounters other disciplines and recognizes its limits" (183).

Hm...one thing I've overlooked is Phelps' focus on composition; she never mentions rhetoric. How does this complicate my work as I refer to both and would prefer to use both? I'd like to speak to folks in both camps, and there are problems there as not all composition programs connect themselves to rhetoric and not all rhetoric programs connect to composition. For example, some composition programs include creative writing, and some rhetoric programs are housed in Communications departments. This makes cross-institution relations and those things that play this roll extremely important (see Lisa Gerard on Computers and Writing).

When people complain about the problems of conducting interdisciplinary research, they need to explain what they mean. Often times, I've seen others complain about how universities don't value this work, but I'm not entirely convinced they know what interdisciplinary work is or what it means. I suppose they mean that their institution doesn't value it in that it doesn't pay for it, or it doesn't value what Rhet/Comp folks bring to such work. One thing I hope to offer or at very least begin to consider is how we can structure such work (or maybe how such work has been structured through cases). I appreciate how Phelps has a very clear, if brief, idea what interdisciplianry work means, but I won't hold my breath that she'll explain what it looks like. Also, what does she mean by offering different views? Does this include audiences, tools, venues, objects?


"...first orientation, toward a certain subject matter. The task is not merely to identify the objects and events that are studied, but to discover how conceptions constitute topics of inquiry in such a way that phenomena present themselves immediately in a certain light" (183).

Comp started as how to teach students to produce certain texts: composing is the fundamental process of written discourse. She deals with writing being divided from reading.


"Recent research has submitted this idea of writing to a critique and moves toward integrating the writer's composing act into a more comprehensive notion of written discourse as a complex social process by which discoursers co-construct meaning. In this project the object of inquiry becomes not writing, reading or texts, but their relationships to one another, to the individual, and to the world." (183).

This allowed for the expansion of the field and for a propensity for expansion. How does this also transform disciplinarity into a capitalist venture? Innovation and the push for new territory fuels disiplinarity? I would disagree with this storyline. What made advancement possible was instead a focus on infrastructure within and across institutions. Phelps and others focus only on part of the story. There's been a series of powerful moments that have shaped the discipline not because of expanding definitions of writing, but by how we approach writing as a praxis that occurs within and across particular spaces with sometimes shared and sometimes unique concerns (e.g., Wyoming Conference).  There's a sort of activism or activity-ism that undergirds this expansion, and it has had both positive and negative effects of what composition becomes as a discipline. My dissertation attempts to make us more conscious about how these moments are structured with the hopes that we can consciously work with these structures and produce more of these moments.


"This brings me to the second orientation of composition scholarship, carried over from its beginnings in the teaching of freshman writing and before that from rhetoric as the organizing principle of classical education. Composition as a profession takes responsibility for facilitating the growth of literacy as well as understanding it. This link between knowledge and action, theoria and praxis, distinguishes composition from other language-related academic fields by making the teaching act itself a primary topic of scholarly inquiries" (187).

Should it be a triumvirate? Knowledge-praxis-infrastructure? There's some awareness in Phelps article that these questions connect to structures, but the focus on discourse and relations among people leaves parts of her earlier formulation (objects, attitudes, etc.) out to dry.

On p. 188 she cites Janice Lauer to say our work begins with practical questions of how to teach composition and moves outward toward abstraction and theory. Phelps is aware that here's some tension here, and she addresses how the field finds fault with the ability to abstract questions of writing as a social practice while at the same time understanding the need to do so. In stories about the formation of composition as a discipline this need becomes apparent, and folks like Crowley go so far as to throw out the practical needs in favor of the abstraction (or to return to Ancient Greece in search of a new disciplinary domain. Crowley argues that composition as a practical foundation for Rhet/Comp is completely bound up in an irredeemable set of relations within and across institutions. To me, this points toward Crowley's conception of ideology and the role it plays in forming and fostering a discipline (see Sanchez and McComiskey). Ideology flows from the top down (or conversely from the bottom, but still in a neatly linear, vertical fashion).


"While every discipline has its praxis, its theories, and its metatheory, in composition these are all bound together and cannot easily be teased apart" (190).

Phelps uses the term "boundary principle" to address how composition thinks of its core work. She raises questions about how we approach work from other fields in order to bring it into composition. Again, she cites Lauer in addressing the need to do so, but also the problems that may arise by pulling from another field. Are we doing so ethically? How are we understanding and using their work in a different context? How are we evaluating our own work to justify this movement? It seems that composition seems very lax about what stands for justification. Is analysis and theoretical probing enough to justify this boundary crossing? We certainly see fewer attempts to empirically justify movement in our field, and often we see little about how this connects back to the "core".

As Phelps argues, "There is perhaps no principled way to set boundaries for research that falls within the domain of composition. But we may usefully speak of a concentration or focusing of research near the core, as defined by the developmental orientation, and work that is closer or further from this center" (191).  We must always imagine this center, but what is this center? Is it classroom practice? Is it something else, such as the grad programs turning out the most professors, the scholars who publish most frequently, the informal networks that steer graduates into certain jobs or even outside academia? We see very little attention to these latter questions from Phelps. I would think she'd call the fyc classroom the core.

Phelps does an excellent job addressing boundaries and boundary crossing on pp. 190 & 191. She refers to another one of her articles, "Foundations for a Modern Psychology of Composition," which I should check out. However, I assume much of this is reiterated in her book.

The essay begins with an exchange between Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate that appeared in the March 1993 issue of College English. The Tate-Lindemann exchange, as Crowley refers to it, was about whether literary texts have a place in composition instruction. Lindemann argues that composition's goal is to train students in conducting social science research, while Tate argues against such a service focus. He argues that the traditional humanist mission of the university applies to composition instruction as well. Therefore, such courses should focus on teaching to be good people and not to teach them to be majors in particular subjects. As Tate believes, such a focus on professionalization denigrates the mission of humanism. In response, Lindemann argues that she did not mean to cast the argument as a political position: she and Tate are working on a book about using literature in composition courses. Her half of the exchange becomes a meaningless foil for Tate's argument.

This exchange raises Crowley's hackles. She argues that teaching literature in composition is in fact a political question. She demonstrates the subjugated relationship that composition has historically played in American colleges and universities by tracing attitudes of Literature professors via quotes dating from the 1800 to mid 1900s. Just as composition and Rhetoric and Composition are coming into their own in the university, the Tate-Lindemann exchange undercuts the less-subjugated position being developed by compositionists within English Studies.

Crowley proceeds by examining responses to the Tate-Lindemann exchange. She dismantles at least some of the response to the initial exchange (which were also published in College English). Some folks supporting the use of Lit in composition argue that students' affective responses to Lit justify the teaching method: students enjoy reading. Crowley notes that they use a post-modern argument, one that actually challenges traditional humanism, by moving away from teaching strict or particular readings of texts.

Crowley argues that a focus on professionalization (preparing students from academic and professional discourses) is inherently a shot against the universality of Literature and the idea that it is the best way to train students to appreciate life, etc.

This marks just about the half-waypoint in the essay. My initial thoughts are conflicted. On the one hand, I agree with Crowley, or at least what she's alluding to, that teaching students how to navigate various discourses is important, and that teaching about rhetoric is the way to do just that. However, I think that in the twenty years since this essay was published Composition has attained a different status within universities, at least in some universities. In order to move past the traditional humanist notions that she describes and Literature's dominance in English Studies, many Compositionists have made "deals with the devil."  I'd point to the sheer number of adjunct instructors that each composition (sometimes in programs administered by R/C folks) and how a strict adherence to arguments for professionalization feed into corporatizing narratives about the role of the university. Even at a lower level, as a graduate student and composition instructor, I often hear other R/C students argue that Literature folks are incapable of making their cases known to administrators, but that's something we're particularly good at. I hear little about how our (R/C folks) arguments and ability to navigate administrative and corporate red tape benefits anyone save our positions and our immediate programs or students. I'm not saying that such skills aren't valuable, but I am wondering if we need to make these maneuvers more transparent so that the work we claim to be doing to alleviate constraint are more widely known. There's far too much behind the scenes maneuvering going on. Also, I'm wondering if one of the reasons some R/C folks aren't more forthcoming about how they think their work helped or protected something or someone is because they know, in the end, they should have made it a bigger battle, involved more people in the battle etc. In some sense, this shadowy maneuvering is justifiable because R/C folks do not see Literature folks as equals/colleagues/etc. While undoubtedly this is a response to decades (centuries?) of poor treatment at the hand of Literature faculty, I'm worried that we may often be losing more than we're gaining. This raises questions for me because it is my understanding that often the most exploited instructors (adjuncts and graduate students) come from the ranks of Literature and not R/C.

Even for those R/C folks who consider the other, in this case Literature students and faculty, in their attempts to establish more equitable treatment at their college or university, I find transparency a must because it can help foster further collaboration, and shared responsibility and governance. Maybe my arguments are vague and naive, but I don't see anything particularly wrong with incorporating some lit in a composition course. I'm teaching a novel this semester, and while I'm using it to discuss current events and social, political, and economic issues surrounding work life, I get the impression that Crowley would have objected to using it at all as she seems to feel that it feeds into Literature's traditional cultural and academic supremacy.

"In 1939, composition presented a certain problem to the discipline of literary studies. While ownership of the universally required course ensured a secure institutional base for English departments, the universal requirement, with its erratic hiring policies and its perceived lack of intellectual integrity, was an embarrassment to a young discipline trying to establish a definite object of study and a carefully developed set of methodologies for studying it." (26)

Are we in a different time? I'd argue yes, but many of the same problems have carried over, and we seem incapable of addressing those problems. We believed that the emancipation of a layer of composition instructors would change things, but in fact many of the problems that Crowley notes have gotten worse. Still, does this mean that we should be done with the universal requirement for once and for all?

Crowley declares a pox on both houses (humanist and professional): "If the required introductory course is to serve specific disciplinary needs, it must either become so specialized that it becomes difficult to see what would hold it together, or it must become so abstract that the work done there would have little reference to actual academic or professional writing." (28)

Crowley concludes by saying that Lindemann's argument toward professionalization simply trades one master for the next. While I don't entirely disagree that that's what has happened in many cases, I do disagree with her take that it is the service nature of the course, that is to say that service has a nature and that nature is subservient and leads to oppressive conditions. Crowley is particularly good at picking apart the discourses she discusses, but has the historical moment she's discussing changed? Can we define service in different ways because its meaning and implementation have changed outside academic institutions? Do networks offer different notions of service? Yes. What are they, and can they be reproduced or affect change in the physical word/non-digital world? How?

Honestly, I just do not have the time to participate in the way I'd hoped. Not yet anyway. As I have so many obligations to get to over the next three days, I've decided that I am not going to ignore my daily posts. Instead, I'm going to buck the self-imposed structure I was going to work with and use the first couple posts to work through some of my present thinking about my dissertation topic. What follows may be a disjointed balance sheet dealing with my experiences at WIDE-EMU a few weeks ago, a meeting I had with Pat this past week, and the projects we're working on in two courses I'm teaching (ENGL 309 Computer-Aided Publishing and ENGL 421 Technical Writing).

In researching p2p theory I've become attached to the heuristic provided by Michel Bauwens: p2p relationality is characterized by peer production, peer governance, and peer property. I've been looking around for examples in academia, particularly in Rhetoric and Composition, that demonstrate these three qualities, and they're a lot harder to come by than I thought.

A previous post appraises a few recent and on-going projects in R/C that get at some of the underlying values, but I'm curious to what extent peer governance and peer property exist in academia. What has peer governance looked like in Rhetoric and Composition? Does, or how does, it come into organizations like Cs, RSA, ATTW, or CWPA? How does governance play out within institutions? Within departments? Within programs? While ideas for teaching and research circulate pointing toward these values, how are we constrained at various levels by particular people (and in another sense by non-human actors, e.g., rules, infrastructures, access, etc.)?

When we rise questions about production, governance, and property outside software development, constraints and affordances become increasingly complex. It makes me wonder if Bauwens is a bit naive about p2p software development. (I most certainly am.)

What about the complexities of working toward these values in an undergraduate classroom? I've begun experimenting with different structures for service projects in an attempt to tease out the nuances and differences between client/server production and peer production.

In ENGL 309 students work with two different partners, the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) and Homestead Consulting Services. The OWL Project was highly structured, and I taught students a particular design process that included deliverables as benchmarks throughout (e.g., a mood board, a design brief, a number of final products incorporating a logo design, and presentation materials). Additionally, students competed with one another to win the "contract". In the second project, the whole class is working together to create one brochure with a client. In an early discussion (and with a lot of prompting) students broke the class into teams: coordinators, researchers, writers, designers, and presenters. Students chose their teams, and they were tasked with creating a list of the what their groups needed to contribute to the project, when their groups would complete said work, and what their individual responsibilities were. The coordinators worked among the groups to ensure that information and work flow where and when its needed. In order to accomplish this work, they created a weekly newsletter to circulate pertinent information to the whole class, and they wrote a lot of emails keeping people on task.

[When presenting on p2p theory at WIDE-EMU I referenced the Homestead CS project's structure when I defined service-learning as writing as a community. To be honest, that presentation was a mess, even messier than this post, but it helped me start to break out of Bauwens' framework. At WIDE-EMU, I struggled to break away from political economy to address p2p theory and network topologies. I ran out of time in terms of writing out my conference paper, and I'm trying to move away from reading papers at conferences. But, winging it didn't work. In any case, one thing that I wasn't able to get across relates to how writing as community does something decidedly different than the frameworks for understanding service described by Tom Deans (writing about, for, or with community). Writing as community attempts to reflect the ordinary hero idea of politics as everyday action. Deans' argument that writing with community relies on notions of good citizenship, particularly concepts of good citizenship that connect to modernist institutions and relationships.]

Another fragment: in ENGL 421 a student writing about software Version Management Systems addresses how p2p VSMs are superior to client/server versions. Client/server versions required that the server store every iteration of the system, which created incredible demands for storage. I'm not sure I entirely understood the implications of the what the student wrote about, but it did remind me that I need to read more about actual p2p architecture.